In the cavernous area of Building 1230, located at the ITT Exelis facility in Rochester, New York, there are two 2.4-meter telescopes, each as big as the Hubble Space Telescope and never flown, sitting on low pedestals.

A rare cosmic zoom lens, which uses the gravity of a large mass to magnify light from distant objects, has allowed a team of US and European astronomers to spot a galaxy so remote that its light was emitted 490 million years after the Big Bang, which is 3.6% of the Universe’s current age.